Palimpsest

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities is quoted late in the film

Some of the main cruxes of the novella are

- everything has a deep schematic foundation that mirrors everything else - stages of life, stages of love, stages of enlightenment, stages of urban growth and decline, all the stages reflect cosmological schemata

- the mirroring is metaphorical, the mirroring and metaphoring are infinite in detail and variation, and memory like the sea shapeshifts everything (especially time and thought and space) into something rich and strange

- there are civilizations beneath civilizations beneath civilizations, layers beneath layers beneath layers, there are invisibles that define and condition and preserve the visible, there are invisibles for the visibles without which the visibles fail

- memory is language

- memory and all the schemata and all the mirroring and metaphoring all spring from one source, a concrete experience, a cosmological epigramme, a metonymically condensed dream

The way the Raul Ruiz's camera eye glidingly connects everything (landscapes interiours people concepts) resonates with the layered structure of Marco Polo's descriptions

The film also borrows from Tarkovsky's Stalker, and the visual framing of most of the scenes is straight out of Renaissance Dutch paintings, perfect because in Dutch painting, mirrors and lenses and camera obscura were heavily used to help create paintings, and were also painted into the paintings for symbolic purposes, mirrors and mirroring play a large role in Dutch paintings and in the film

Het Dak Van De Walvis touches upon so many things, this is just a still-percolating cauldron of thoughts and chunks of wonderful subtitle

Ancestry, generations, survival, dreams, monuments, mirrors, sociometry, prophet dreams of Indian tribes

Pyramids, sandscape, phase of moon, images engraved in mountains, mirages

Hands in the black cloven earth, artefact of a wine cup, Eva, Adam, handprint, listening, thinking

triangulaton of mise-en-scene - vanishing point, infinite regression, child at the apex, religious symbolism, pictoral depth simulating temporal depth

Standing like Charon over the river Lethe with his stick/oar, a silvery sceptor lit by distant red fireglow set against a deep inpenetratable black backdrop (chiaroscuro), each tap of the stick a nudging of the bottom of the riverbed to propel the boat forwards or backwards, to propel the chain of thoughts forward and backwards, man pondering and exploring old relics that are novel to him - similar to Jan Van Eyck painting's showcasing people entranced with technological novelties and scientific discoveries

Excavation of vanishing language

Reincarnation, hunger, war, rain, summer, eclipse of the sun and moon, stars, sea, earth, mother, fatal conflicts between two tribes, death, river stones, light of the moon, sea of whales, woman, fire-water, sun, deaf, artillery fire, walking with no sense of direction, thirst, endless, G-d of the mountain, raw meat, evenings alone, strong emotion at sunset, sheep, explanation of the meaning of life, violin, thirty glasses of fire-water in the morning

Triangular mise-en-scene

Digging but not finding anything

But then an animal skeleton in the palm of a hand, a celestial panorama at sundown, a pearly white roaring ocean, right into a scene with character examining plants, ceramics, stones, windows, camera gliding across windows and doorways

Adam and Eve buried all our mirrors, lashed then cried

60 root words responsible for 300,000 Yaghan words, biblically speaking, Adam and Eve responsible for generating billions times billions times billions of people

Metaphors, double and triple metaphors, generations built everything up, no factouries nor airports and now exploitation, I heard a baby cry then Adam and Eve laughed, Now I understand everything,

The 60 Yaghan words are an arithmetical system, they add, subtracts, multiply and divide according to rules which clarify everything, Adam and Eden exchange names, one human exploits another, photograph - in light, in darkness, dark of primitive man, light enlightenment/the dawn of understanding

Double, triple metaphors are no coincidence, they mean the intuition of 2 and 3 as spoken, they are incapable of more modern thought because conception of the singular eludes them, they are convinced that 1 is an even number, so regression is infinite (cosmological epigramme...)

Books, dancing, shadow, rippling water, they bury the mirrors again, crying sounds like the crying of whales

Whaling/wailing

Every word or saying tacitly contains others, tacit metaphors speak between spoken metaphors, silence means more said

Every heartbeat has a name

Every day they construct a different language, a Gothic Cathedral dreamt up at night, forgotten by morning, proof that too much culture leads to barbarism and hinders development

The world is contained in 60 words, each implies the whole in its own perspective, denying singularity, two things are said at once, each double reflection of the world 59 second degree reflections, the intelligent become increasingly silent, hand (creating, pottering, fashioning, building, grasping, clutching) refracted miraged, boat/triangulation

Illusion, the Indians' language is non-existent, they are recessives, not pure Indians, nothing they do or say has meaning, the whole world deceives me

I shall not return

Be careful what you say because somebody will believe it and your metaphoric images will become a religion and religion is the opinion of the people

Recitative (Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities)

Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities resembled one another, as if the passage from one to another involved not a journey but a change of elements. Now, from each city Marco described to him, the Great Khan's mind set out on its own, and after dismantling the city piece by piece, he reconstructed it in other ways, substituting components, shifting them, inverting them. Marco, meanwhile, continued reporting his journey, but the emperor was no longer listening. Kublai interrupted him: "From now on I shall describe the cities and you will tell me if they exist and are as I have conceived them. I shall begin by asking you about a city of stairs, exposed to the sirocco, on a half-moon bay. Now I shall list some of the wonders it contains....."

Movements like a swimming whale, conducting the ocean, conducting the sun, conducting the invisible

Draped like a Roman Emperer, Where do I come from, where is my fatherland, I was searching, but you found a new world for me

People of the world, loneliness...unbearable, your visit moves my soul, soul...moves

A final judgement of the people will reveal

I have returned, I forget everything when I step foot in the house

Wailing, Whaling, walking backwards - regression, you have travelled widely, I am afraid, I am leaving

Visitor versus inhabitant, home and unhomed, communication and incommunicability, language as symbol, language as process, borders and borderlessness, impression of landscape/city/space more important than structure